Dealing With Water Dispensers

Dealing With Water Dispensors

One of the most frequent calls I get has to do with the water dispensers in refrigerator doors. There can be all sorts of causes for these water dispensers going wrong. In this post I will delve into some common problems, and offer a few solutions that you can try on your own.

Why is the water dispenser so problematic? Let’s look at the one I worked on today for example. This was on one of the top-of-the-line refrigerators on the market, a Jenn air, and the problem was that neither the ice maker or the water dispenser would work. I suspected that there was a problem with the water valve that is activated when you press in the little button on the door with your glass.

These water valves are activated by a magnetic solenoid which opens a spring-loaded valve to allow water to pass through when it is fed power by the door switch your glass presses. It is not uncommon for the door switch to short out and cease to feed power to the water valve.

It is also not uncommon for the magnetic solenoid to short out and become unable to open the valve even though it is receiving the correct electricity down to it. These are normally the first two things I check.
I normally do this by pulling refrigerator out and taking the back cover off so that I can see the wires leading to the water valve. Then I take an electrical tester, the kind you can just hold up next to a wire and will light up if the water has power to it. I have someone, normally the homeowner, press in the water dispenser to see if the switch is feeding power to the valve.

If the water valve is getting power, I next need to find out if the solenoid is being activated which I can usually do by disconnecting one of the water connections coming out of the solenoid.
However today, after checking all these and discovering that everything was okay, I found a brand-new disturbance that I had never seen before. On this particular refrigerator, the water filter device had failed even though a factory bypass had already been installed. This failure was not allowing the water to reach the valve so it could be dispensed.

Luckily, the homeowner had already bypassed the filter because the tap water in her area was excellent. So she had no problem with me actually bypassing the filter system altogether and running her water straight into the valve, which corrected the problem immediately.